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He was raised in Avalon. He tought himself playing guitar at the age of nine. While he was working as a sharecropper he played at local dances and parties. He did his first recording in 1928 for Okeh Records but was not successful. So he worked on as a sharecropper and played on at the local parties.

1953 two songs of Hurt were included in the album The Anthology of American Folk Music and an Australian found a copy of Avalon Blues. So the interest in finding John Hurt himself increased. In 1963 Tom Hoskins found him in Avalon and found out that his musical skill was still intact. He brought him to Washington, D. C. He started playing at greater festivals like the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. In his later years he often played in colleges, concert halls, coffee houses and also on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He also recorded three albums for Vanguard Records and recorded most of his songs for the Library of Congress.

Hurt influenced different music genres like blues, country, bluegrass, folk and contemporary rock and roll. He died 1966 from a heart attack in Grenada, Mississippi.